For overall system performance we use PCMark Vantage. This is run in both x86 and x64 mode to give the best indication of performance.

Again we see numbers that are just not right. The PCMark Vantage performance is just plain off from where it should be. We checked a few of the settings in the BIOS to make sure there was nothing set improperly for memory or for the CPU and did not find anything. But, it is important to remember that synthetic tests are not the whole story, so we are not overly concerned with the performance here.

For synthetic gaming tests we used the industry standard and overlockers bragging tool 3DMark Vantage. This is a test that strives to mimic the impact modern games have on a system. Futuremark went a long way to change from the early days of graphics driven tests to a broader approach including physics, AI and more advanced graphics simulations.

3DMark Vantage uses the DX10 API in addition to having support for PhysX. As we are no longer using an NVIDIA GPU for testing (at least until we can get a GTX 4xx card) you will only see the CPU based PhysX results in the scores. For testing we use the Performance test run.

Hmm, this was actually not expected. Usually we see good performance from GIGABYTE in 3DMark Vantage. Unfortunately we are just not seeing that here.

Cinebench is a synthetic rendering tool developed by Maxon. Maxon is the same company that developed Cinema4D, another industry leading 3D Animation application. Cinebench R11.5 tests your systems ability to render across a single and multiple CPU cores. It also tests your systems ability to process OpenGL information.

Ok, now this is more like it. Here we see performance that we expected from what is obviously supposed to be a top end board.

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